Hi and welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Hannah, and this episode is all about building a software

company in healthcare. In this conversation, Jorge Condi, A16Z general partner in bio and

healthcare, previous founder of the genomics company, Noam, and Julie Yu, partner on the deal team

for the bio fund and previous founder of the patient provider matching system, Chiris,

explain what it is that makes building a company in the healthcare space

so fundamentally different from in other sectors,

and why exactly it's so damn hard?

So let's start with basically just the very fundamental difference

between building a software company, full stop,

and building a software company in the healthcare space.

What are the most foundational

crucial differences? Well, historically at least software had two very important sort of qualities

in healthcare. The first one, the actual quality of software deployed in healthcare system

historically has not been great. User interface wise and experience wise. Bad track record.

Bad track record there. And the second one is that it was

usually not highly valued. So at least a lot of times it was considered either free or cheap.

And why was that? That from the very beginning there was not a lot of value attached to this.

On the healthcare system, a lot of things still have a very human component to them,

automating things and sort of creating

frictionless experiences or delightful experiences, the things that software is really good at doing,

it's just really hard to do in the healthcare system.

The second one is, I'm going to generalize for a second, but I think a lot of times in the

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